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You Gonna Eat That?

There are few places where the edict "Don't shit where you eat" is followed so closely as in a restaurant kitchen. Unlike their food, industry gossip is not considered by chefs to be fit for public consumption. But restaurant lifer Tony Bourdain, the executive chef (at least for now) at Manhattan's Les Halles, couldn't care less. In his forthcoming memoir/cautionary tale, Kitchen Confidential (Bloomsbury USA, $25), he offers practical advice (never order fish on Monday night) and opinions on everything from vegans to celebrity chefs. His avalanche of colorful stories results in a goodly number of maxims to eat by; namely, never piss off the chef, lest he do the same on your mussels.

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Esquire: There's a scene in your book at a wedding reception where the bride sneaks off and has sex with the chef. Was this the moment you knew you wanted to cook for a living?

Bourdain: Looking back, I think this was just a desperately unhappy woman looking to humiliate herself with the first greasy cook she could find. I mean, she's in her wedding dress, leaning over a five-gallon paint bucket. It looked good to me at the time.

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And those were the days before cable made chefs famous. What do you think of celebrity chefs like Emeril, Bobby Flay, and Mario Batali? Mario's cool. He strikes me as a line cook. That's the highest compliment you could pay a chef, by the way--to call him a good cook. Bobby Flay? A motherfucking hustler. But if he's doing what he's doing in ten years, I'll consider him a hero. Emeril is the Antichrist. I'm consumed with fantasies of causing him harm. His food is crap. His act is crap. He's an offense to everything I stand for. He is the most beloved American chef. Now, keep in mind that the last most beloved American chef was the Frugal Gourmet, Jeff Smith, and he was molesting altar boys. It's painful to watch such a low level of performance being received as authority. Most TV chefs make the rest of us look like boobs.

What if you were offered a show? I'm a 'ho for money. If nude midget wrestling was getting the same ratings as Emeril and I had the chance, I'd be smacking the little fellas around 24 hours a day. I'd take it. But I'd be so filled with self-loathing and rage, I'd fuck up horribly.

He Write Even Prettier

SEVEN YEARS AGO, I was lucky enough to put David Sedaris on public radio. What attracted a lot of listeners to him were the stories of bitter outsiders that filled his first book, Barrel Fever. But once David became a best-selling author and a beloved radio personality--not to mention a contributing editor to Esquire--his status as a misunderstood outsider became a little wobbly. So he moved to France, where he's encountered an entire nation of people who don't seem to like him very much. The result is his new book, Me Talk Pretty One Day (Little, Brown, $23). In his early writing, David sometimes made fun of foreigners with bad accents. Now he's the foreigner with the bad accent, and the shift in point of view pretty much sums up his evolution as a writer. Bitterness has been replaced with a reluctant empathy. What's amazing is that somehow the new stories are just as funny as the old ones. A lot of people think they love David for his acidic tongue--which is still there, believe me--but I think it's his empathetic side, his skill in evoking real affection and sadness in his stories, that from the beginning brought people back for more. --IRA GLASS

Look Homeward

Considering Esquire's literary heritage, we can't help but embrace a design book that quotes Thoreau and Whitman and employs Strunk and White's Elements of Style--"A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences-.-.-.-turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style--all mannerisms, tricks, adornments"--as metaphor for the principles behind making one's pad one's own. Award-winning design-guru-with-a-sense-of-humor Marco Pasanella's Living in Style Without Losing Your Mind (Simon & Schuster, $30) hails simplicity and honesty to oneself as the most important principles of decorating. Good advice, whether you're on Walden Pond or the West Side Highway.